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Strikeforce 5/21 Rose Garden in Portland, Oregon
By Zach Arnold | May 21, 2010
- Lightweights: Pat Healy vs. Bryan Travers
- Middleweights: Nate Moore vs. Tarec Saffiedine
- Welterweights: Roger Bowling vs. Bobby Voelker
- Welterweights: Tyron Woodley vs. Nathan Coy
- Middleweights: Matt Lindland vs. Kevin Casey
Kevin Casey hangs out with reality TV show personalities Spencer Pratt & Heidi Montag. I’m not sure that justifies someone of his record and level to be competing against Matt Lindland, but maybe it will sell tickets and draw ratings for Showtime.
Topics: Media, MMA, StrikeForce, Zach Arnold | 26 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Casey’s match with Minowa has also been purged from Youtube and Dailymotion.
Why was Fancy Pants vs. shaolin an undercard fight when it is more deserving to be on the main card then half these fights?
Me thinks it’s money issues. I don’t think these Challenger shows have a big enough budget for that fight.
Casey is also a high level grappler under Rickson Gracie.
Not really. He got kicked out of the Gracie school for giving himself a black belt.
Now that is a classic move. To bad I’m loosing respect for Strikeforce very fast with such a weak main event such as this. Why not pair him up with Tim Kennedy and see if he can still get it done? Makes alote more sense.
Yes it does…. yes it does.
Where in the world is Tim Kennedy?
I ran into Kennedy last night.
He is living in Austin and just yesterday signed to fight on the next Strikeforce. He said he was not yet at liberty to say who the opponent is, but it’s a known guy.
Also, he just finished taping for some MTV show where rappers fight each other after training under MMA fighters.
I hope they use Kennedy well. I really enjoy watching him fight.
There’s a great book about Special Forces selection called ‘Chosen Soldiers’ and he’s profiled in it. They change the name of all the soldiers and he’s referred to as Tom Kendall but it’s really Tim.
Thanks Fluyid,
I guess I just really don’t understand him. I met him at the army combatives championships back in late 06 and he really seemed hell bent on making a name for himself in mma. He ended up getting a job with the reserves or Guard down there to be able to concentrate on mma, or at least thats what he made it out to be in interviews.
I guess a guy who’s killed a lot of people probably has mood changes a good amount.
Tim Kennedy had the two Strikeforce fights where he smoked Nick Thompson then undefeated 11-0 Zak Cummings with like a 200-1 punch , Then strikefore puts him on a shelf and won’t let him fight. I know he’s training 3x a day plus and very hungry to eat someone. I hope they start letting him fight more often. He always puts on a great dominate show.
He gave himself a black belt? How the hell do you do that? Just start showing up wearing a black belt?
[…] Woodley didn’t get booked for the St. Louis show and instead, he now finds himself taking a Challengers show booking in Portland where he will face Team Quest fighter Nathan Coy. In other words, Woodley had a chance to come off […]
Mauro has mentioned both Gordon Solie and Jim Ross before the end of the 1st fight was over. Geeezzzz…. It sounded like somebody was in his ear giving him grief about it, because he then quickly talked about MMA being real….
That music being pumped into the telecast between the end of the fight and the judges decision is horrible. WTF is the point?
Ed. — Dave Meltzer loved it. “This was a really fun fight. Besides, we had references to Karl Gotch and Gordon Solie during this match.”
In other news, I cannot believe how loud that crowd was at the Moosin show. Holy smokes.
Worcester White Trash has the ability to get real loud. And I say that as a partial joke. It’s a good small city.
1) I thought on paper, the last 2 Strikeforce cards (this one and the Overeem card) had some good even match-ups on paper. The main event for this show is garbage, but the rest was decent.
2) The middle 3 fights have all been solid.
3) I was sold on Woodley, and now I have to take that back. Even though he got the win, this killed him as a legit prospect. I thought the fight was very close. Hard to judge. But Coy is a guy who lost to Foster and Bradley. For all the hype Woodley was getting (which I thought was justified), it was a complete letdown.
4) This feels like the “Blow Your Load Show”. Guys coming out like non-professionals, blowing their loads, and being gassed by round 2.
5) No reason for a rematch. Stupid Mauro gets even more stupid.
I love how Woodley winning a tough fight against a top west coast fighter who absolutely belongs in the top leagues “killed him as a legit prospect”. You sound desperate. The reality is, this was an A+ night for the development of their welterweight division. Saffiedine, Bowling, Woodley and Coy all gave great accounts of themselves.
By the way, Coy also beat Mike Pierce and Rick Story, who are now 5-2 combined in the UFC.
Top West Coast Fighter? Thanks for the laugh!!
And those wins aren’t against anybody that good. The best is against an aging Brock Larson.
Coy would be a forgotten UFC Welterweight at best. He gave Woodley everything he could handle.
Woodley was completely exposed in that fight. He was being hyped up like the next big thing of the division. Instead, all we got was another mid level guy with not much of a future.
Let me also add…. The 3 middle fights on that card were fun to watch. I enjoyed them. But to try and make more out of those guys is stretching it beyond reality.
All of those guys would be mid-level UFC Welterweights. None of them showed anything that would indicate they could rise above that.
We see those types of quality fighters on UFC cards all the time…. And nobody is hyping those guys up. Nobody is acting like they are going to be world beaters. The same should apply to these Strikeforce guys.
I think Strikeforce did a much better job with their matchmaking for this card. The fights were much more evenly matched. But it takes a real Strikeforce nuthugger to act like what we saw from those guys was anything remotely special.
This is kind of the same reaction you gave to Jacare for not finishing a tough opponent in 90 seconds. At some point I don’t think it’s an entirely bad thing to see these guys face the adversity of fighting a tough, game opponent who doesn’t wilt immediately and see these prospects gut out a tough win.
Just because you win a fight that goes to decision, whether it be in dominating fashion (like Jacare – if you’re able to ignore the utter garbage commentary) or a hard fought close one – doesn’t mean your hype and future are unjustified.
It’s not the fact that they couldn’t finish. It’s that once we got to see them stretched beyond a round, it really showed us what kind of fighters they were.
We were all judging Woodley based on what he could do in under 5 minutes. And it was based on the assumption that he could do that for the entire fight.
Instead what we got as a fighter who blows his load in the 1st round fighting way over his abilities, and is a less then stellar fighter by the 3rd round. Same thing with Jacare. And Dong Hyun Kim in the UFC.
Woodley was certainly exposed last night.
Jacare literally dominated every minute of that fight…even when it looked like he might be “gassing” he ate some punches and didn’t wilt, came back with some of his own and plowed Villasenor to the ground. Probably really would have continued to work him over but there was a pretty awful stand-up and instead of get all sour about the stand-up he just turned around and put him right on his back again.
He’s gone a full 15 min with Miller before too, so I don’t buy your “now we get to see what they look like when they’re stretched past 1 round”…so I think your hate on Jacare is completely without merit. If he was an up and coming UFC guy you’d be hooked on him like a baby koala.
If anything we saw a prospect at MW who didn’t take his ball and go home as soon as he didn’t finish in 90 seconds and displayed a bit of brass and grit. Quite frankly he impressed me far more than the last 3 challengers for the UFC belt at MW.
Put it this way – I’m pretty sure you’ve got a wood for Phil Davis as a prospect, but I’ve seen some of his fights that were less impressive than that performance so I don’t get your angle.
Davis is a guy to watch at this point. Nothing more, nothing less. Of course his physical abilities turns heads. Same thing with Woodley. But Woodley was dominated in the 3rd round by a less then stellar opponent. Had absolutely nothing once his opponent got beyond his athleticism.
Let me put it this way…. Before Friday’s Fight, many people thought woodley could be a threat to Diaz. Some people thought he could ruffle some feathers in the UFC’s Welterweight Division. After Friday, he looked like a UFC prelim guy without a huge future.
Hence why his hype is gone.
How in the hell did Woodley win that fight?, what a freaking joke so much for his hype train if he can’t beat a guy like Coy he has not business calling out Diaz.
Boy do I hate mma judging sometimes, it really is deflating to watch a guy fight a great fight and end up being screwed out of a win by inept judges disgusting.
The ending is he funniest part. Mauro screeching in the cage, and Lindland saying outside of Anderson and Chael the best MWs in the world are in SF. Really? Didn’t Vitor send you out of the ring on a stretcher…
I guess Woodly hasn’t changed much from his days training with Coy at Team Quest. I do however think Woodley won. I’ll prolly watch it again just to make sure.